Once touted as the clean wonder fuel of the future, hydrogen fuel cells for cars
or homes are now routinely panned as inefficient and impractical, particularly when compared to technologies like electric cars or solar thermal water heaters.

Hydrogen burns clean out of the car's tailpipe, but producing hydrogen at a factory generates significant amount of CO2. The standard hydrogen process involves mixing methane with water at 815 degrees Celsius.

It takes about a megawatt-hour worth of electricity to produce enough hydrogen to drive a fuel cell car 1,000 miles. If the electricity came from a coal-burning power plant, it would generate about 2,100 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to Romm's calculations.

By contrast, a gas-powered car that gets about 40 miles per gallon would produce 485 pounds of CO2, or less than a quarter. (The MIT Technology Review does an extended analysis of the book..)

Of course, different variable will impact the results, but none really upend his argument. Here are some hypothetical options. You could get electric power from a plant running on hydroelectric or solar power. Coal fired plants, however, produce a substantial amount of the electricity in the U.S. ( Coal produces 23 percent of the total energy consumed in the U.S.--it's bested only by oil at 40 percent, according to stats from the National Renewable Energy Lab.). Therefore, on average, a hydrogen car would likely result in more CO2 than a standard car.

Hydrogen can also be produced at nuclear power plants or through biological or chemical reactions. These methods would short-circuit coal, but neither are considered practical or economical alternatives for mass production at the moment. Similarly, solar-powered stations for splitting water into hydrogen and water via electroalysis wouldn't pollute, but they also don't exist.

To top it off, the conventional hydrogen generating techniques produce lots of CO2 independent of the CO2 produced by the coal: for every kilogram of hydrogen, 9.3 kilograms of CO2 are produced.

Hydrogen backers, though, assert that many of these problems can be ameliorated through better, non-coal-burning electrical plants. Unlike gas cars, hydrogen cars belch out their CO2 at the factory, so the gas could be stored underground someday.
Sequestration experiments are just getting underway.

So it's not completely dead, but the arguments against it are getting stronger. Municipalities are tinkering with the idea of deploying hydrogen cars as fleet cars, which never have to travel too far from a central filling station. These trials could become a big indicator if hydrogen has much of a chance in the coming decades.

Of course, this doesn't mean other alt fuel vehicles won't make it. There's a lot of work going on in biofuels and batteries and even hydrogen hybrids.

I very much doubt this is true. The arguments cited in the article are not new, nor are they increasing in strength. I suspect that most people who have closely followed the development of hydrogen as a clean energy technology have been well aware of these production problems. Both the government and private companies are working on technologies to overcome the problems cited in the article and it is unlikely that no reasonable solutions can be found...hence it is silly to claim that the arguments against hydrogen are increasing in strength. See...

Hydrogen is a way for the fat cats to get richer and hold the rest of us by the nads. Electric is proven and until hydrogen is affordable/safe in about 50yrs we should be spending these HUNDREDS of MILLIONS on more practical things like health care for our elderly and education for our future leaders. Nooooo we will give it to big oil to research hydrogen so they can get even richer.

My god wake up people were all just tools for the power elite to use. Also rent the video who killed the electric car it gives an idea how far elecric cars have come from over the past 20yrs.

Calm your paranoia nerves there jack. I have no idea of your "expertise" on the matter, but you sound like a paranoid old man. remember: there are worse things in the world then the oil companies getting richer through hydrogen research; one of those would be them getting richer off of producing more oil.

Hydrogen from solar energy is just around the corner. see: Solar Hydrogen via Water Splitting in Advanced Monolithic Reactors, as well as from other renewable sources or even from magnesium recyclable catalysts (CNET story).

Thanks panosvk, I was going to bring that up. I think the eventual goal is to produce hydrogen using solar energy, not through using conventional electricity to create hydrogen for fuel cells.

I think it's a no brainer that using electricity from conventional power plants to create hydrogen and then in turn use that hydrogen to power cars is less efficient than just using that electricity directly in batteries.

In 2004, coal-fired plants accounted for 52 percent of total electricity production in the US, followed by nuclear at 21 percent, natural gas at 16 percent, hydro at 7, oil at 3, and geothermal and others at 1 percent. These statistics come from the Department of Energy.

The conversion of electricity to hydrogen and back into electricity is not great. You would realistically be looking at an efficiency of around 20%. Take a battery on the other hand and the efficiency is aroun 80%. People should seriously look into electrics over hydrogen if they really want efficiency. There are just fewer conversions of energy and that is going to save tons.

The conversion of electricity to hydrogen and back into electricity is not great. You would realistically be looking at an efficiency of around 20%. Take a battery on the other hand and the efficiency is around 80%. People should seriously look into electrics over hydrogen if they really want efficiency. There are just fewer conversions of energy and that is going to save tons.

The problem with you wonderfully misconstrued point is this: Percentages are not an effective way to compare the two options. If you are looking to sound like a puppet, point taken. If not, i suggest that you re-read wherever you got that information for some hard numbers. I am not saying you are wrong, just that you should reiterate your point.

It would be nice if the article compared apples to apples instead of apples to oranges. For i.e. they said that the factory that produces the hydrogen has to mix two chemicals that produces more co2 then the average car. How much does the factory produce in making the engine and the gasoline?

The overall conversion efficiency (initial energy input, to electricity,
to hydrogen, to energy released in the fuel cell) would probably
have to be raised quite a bit to get the costs down before much use
would be made of hydrogen, if Wikipedia can be believed on this
subject. The rewards would ultimately be worth it, but it might be a
while yet.

So what if creating hydrogen pumps out some CO2. CO2 comprises only about 3% of the total of greenhouse gases. About 95% of greenhouse gases is water vapor but I don't hear anyone campaigning for limits on evaporation.

As far as I'm concerned just about anything that breaks our need to import oil is OK with me. Bring on the fuel cells.

"It is a misstake to think of hydrogen as an energy source, that is flat out wrong, it is an energy storage method."

You're differentiation between "energy source" and "energy storage method" is nonsensical. A method implies a process or procedure...whereas hydrogen itself is neither process nor procedure, it is simply an element.

Hydrogen, like coal, oil, water behind a damn, batteries, is a store of energy. There are processes that can release the stored energy in a useful way and when this occurs the hydrogen/oil etc becomes an energy source. They both storage and, under the right conditions, source...

Onsite development of Hydrogen from water is being researched and done around the globe, it is not just a dream or holy grail anymore, it is a fact. Now with the many thousands of indivuals involved in the oil, gas and electrical industries there are some indivuals who are very well supplied with funds and power and who stop at nothing to maintain the status quo. When hydrogen on demand is supplied to a fuel cell, the result is electricity and water, this water can be recirclulated to be used again.

Onsite development of Hydrogen from water is being researched and done around the globe, it is not just a dream or holy grail anymore, it is a fact. Now with the many thousands of indivuals involved in the oil, gas and electrical industries there are some indivuals who are very well supplied with funds and power and who stop at nothing to maintain the status quo. When hydrogen on demand is supplied to a fuel cell, the result is electricity and water, this water can be recirclulated to be used again.

What ever happened to the can do attitude that used to be part
of the chip on our shoulder. We have known for the last 40
years that fossil fuels are not replenishing themselves, but all we
can come up with are reasons as to why NOT try to develop new
hydrogen technologies. Not efficient enough, not cost effective,
to expensive, we dont have the technology etc...We are the
richest, smartest, country in the world with the resources to
solve this technological problem, but we choose to listen to
these can't do people with different agendas. I think we're just
lazy these days.

The knock on wind as a solution is that the wind doesn't always blow. Let's say you were going to build a wind plant to provide a gigawatt continuously. If you put in 1.5 gig of wind and used the excess to run hydrogen generators, store the hydrogen and then put in fuel cells to make up for deficits when the wind stopped you could get rid of any reliance on fossil fuels (for that plant). Excess hydrogen could be sold as fuel. The cost would be exorbidant but think back to when Eisenhower proposed the the Interstate Highway system. An enormous investment in infrastucture that has fueled our economy fo half a century.

This article is intimidation!
All of this delusions were destroyed in "Twenty Hydrogen Myths" by AMORY B. LOVINS, from ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE
http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E03-05_20HydrogenMyths.pdf

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